People
Project team
Research Community
The project is situated within a wider intellectual community working across international law, environmental justice, decolonisation, Pacific studies and the humanities.
At Melbourne Law School, this community includes Professor Sundhya Pahuja, whose scholarship has transformed approaches to international law, development, empire and decolonisation, and Sanam Amin, whose work brings international law and human rights into conversation with documentary practice and histories of political struggle.
The project is also in dialogue with Dylan Asafo, whose research centres Pacific peoples’ engagements with law, climate change, environmental protection and decolonisation.
The project’s public and audio-visual dimensions are developed with Greta Robenstone, Digital Content Producer at Melbourne Law School, whose work specialises in translating research through documentary, audio and video.
Creative Collaboration
Counterarchives treats literature and art not simply as illustrations of an established historical record, but as forms of knowledge in their own right. Creative collaborations explore how writing, images and archival experimentation can make visible experiences and forms of nuclear harm that conventional institutional archives have obscured,
fragmented or failed to record.
Erika Kobayashi is a Japanese writer and visual artist whose practice moves across fiction, visual art, installation and archival research. Her work explores radiation, nuclear history, family memory, women’s lives and forms of experience rendered invisible within official
accounts of the past. Her collaboration with Counterarchives extends the project’s investigation of nuclear memory, archival absence and the problem of making invisible harm perceptible.
International Research Network
Beyond Melbourne, Counterarchives is developing an international scholarly network spanning the Pacific, Europe, Asia and North America. It brings together researchers working on nuclear history, international law, environmental justice, colonialism and decolonisation, literature, and the history of science and technology. The network includes Titaua Peu, Director (Déléguée) of DSCEN and Mā‘ohi writer; Anaïs Maurer, Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University; Toshihiro Higuchi, Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University; Professor Jayita Sarkar, Professor of Global History of Inequalities at the University of Glasgow; Roberto Lalli, historian of science and technology at Politecnico di Torino; Barbara Hof, historian of science and technology at Charles University; Dr Matthew Adamson, Director of Academic and Student Affairs at McDaniel College Budapest; Gloria Maritza Gómez
Revuelta, historian of science, technology and international politics at the University of Guadalajara; Néstor Herran, Maître de conférences at Sorbonne Université; and Waqar Zaidi, historian of science, technology, atomic energy and international relations at Lahore University of Management Sciences. Together, these relationships allow Counterarchives to place the Nuclear Pacific within a wider global history of nuclear science, international institutions, colonialism, environmental transformation and political resistance.
Research Connections
Pacific, Mā‘ohi Nui (French Polynesia) & Aotearoa New Zealand
Counterarchives is developing a wider set of research connections with scholars, advocates and practitioners working on nuclear justice, memory, archives, environmental history, international law and decolonisation across the Pacific. These connections include Ariana Tibon-Kilma, Chairperson of the Republic of the Marshall Islands National Nuclear Commission; Hinamoeura Morgant-Cross, Representative in the Assembly of French Polynesia and anti-nuclear advocate; Manatea Taiarui, researcher in contemporary history at the University of French Polynesia / Maison des Sciences de l’Homme du Pacifique; Tamatoa Tepuhiarii, researcher in anthropology and Indigenous narratives of nuclear impacts in French Polynesia; Bedi Racule, Pacific climate and nuclear justice advocate; Vanessa Griffen,
Fijian writer and anti-nuclear activist; Dr Marco de Jong, Pacific historian at AUT Law School; Professor Rebecca Priestley, historian of science at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington; Dr Kate Dewes ONZM, nuclear disarmament scholar and adviser to the Disarmament and Security Centre; and Professor Alexander Gillespie, Professor of Law at the University of Waikato. These relationships connect the project to living traditions of Pacific anti-nuclear activism, scholarship and advocacy, and create possibilities for archival research, oral history, public scholarship and future comparative work across nuclear-affected regions.
Counterarchives brings law, testimony, science, literature, art, community knowledge and historical records into conversation.